Amy Bloom - Normal

Peggy Rudd is the boss and the model for the wives, their spokesperson, the movement’s spokesperson, the cruise director, the school nurse. Mel, all hearty kindness, a genial grandfather even in a dress and bolero jacket, does not seem to have the same obligation. None of the men say to me, “I’ve learned so much from Mel.” Like many husbands of dynamic, take-charge women, he is one of Peggy’s biggest fans, supportive and teasing, emphatically appreciative, and just slightly digging in his heels. “She’s just go, go, go,” he says. He is a good old boy in drag, always looking for a laugh, a little good-natured fun, another party, another piece of bread and butter under Peggy’s watchful eye (the whole table knows of his cholesterol troubles and hers). Although he does not make a pretty woman, he makes a reasonably good overweight, coarse-featured sixty-year-old woman, I think, but my eyes have adjusted: none of these guys look as tall or as large to me as they are.

With a slightly pursed expression, Peggy says, “My next book is on joy. The difference between the level of joy that crossdressers experience”—she holds her hand up over her head—“and the level of joy that their wives experience.” Her hand drops to her waist. The crossdressers around us say nothing. They nod, joyous astronauts sympathizing with the poor wives left behind and trying not to show how much more fun they’re having. I think of the twinkle in Mel’s eyes and the fact that there is never anything like a twinkle in Peggy’s. It must be psychologically exhausting for her to turn this pain into a shared hobby, his compulsion into entertainment, his need into an occasion for celebration, and I feel ashamed that knowing all that, I still prefer his company.

Peggy turns to Lori. “You are so special,” she says, as she does every night. “You are just the most beautiful crossdresser I’ve ever seen. Everyone wants to sit next to you, you’re so beautiful.”

As I’ve learned in the past couple of days, Lori is a preoperative male-to-female transsexual; if she weren’t with our group, she would stand out only as an unusually elegant woman on a Carnival cruise. Transsexuals sometimes come to transgender events, for a number of reasons, personal and political, but many feel that having resolved their problems through surgery, they have no need for the transgender community, for people who are defined as “other,” and that they can now simply slip into the rest of America with legally changed ID and, like transgendered Anatole Broyards, enter into new lives and answer easier questions. Lori is here because she is accompanying one of her best friends, a crossdresser whose wife couldn’t make it at the last minute.

The implication of Peggy’s flattery is clear: Your performance as a woman is so good. I don’t think Peggy means to offend; she can’t help it. Transsexuals make crossdressers nervous: maybe there is a continuum, maybe crossdressers just feel more mildly what transsexuals feel so deeply, and maybe those feelings will become overpowering if not reined in by wives and children and Tri-Ess’s marital guidelines. Almost every crossdresser in the group compliments Lori. No wife has the nerve, or the wish, except Peggy. Other passengers send over requests for photographs with the beautiful crossdresser every night.

And Lori is deeply offended every night. If this were Tootsie 2 , she would leap up, etiquette be damned, and say, “How dare you decide that I am the evening’s entertainment? I don’t ask the Don Rickles look-alike at Table Six to pose for us with his outrageous, hedgehoglike toupee. I don’t send the waiter over to ask that the entire clan, three generations of short, pointy-headed, potbellied men, waddle over so I can show my friends the perils — not that I’m making a judgment — of inbreeding.” And the entire dining room would cheer as Lori tossed her head prettily. If necessary, she would deck someone (although she doesn’t have the build for it), which would be hilarious, and if the screenwriter had seen In and Out , all the waiters would don wigs and sing “I’m Every Woman” in their Thai, Mexican, South African, and Jamaican accents, until the insensitive slunk away or — as Peggy Rudd told me had happened on a previous cruise — the other guests began donning wigs too, partying along with and expressing envy for the fun-loving crossdressers.

This is not what happens. Lori withdraws, fending off the curious and the compliments, until she is as cool and pleasant as a white-gloved lady on the subway.

After dinner we make our way to the ship’s theater for the talent show. It is an amazing evening, beginning with the small man who approaches us from behind potted plants, leering like Groucho, murmuring, “You ladies look lovely tonight” with the hopeful fatuity of John Cleese. The crossdressers in our group dimple and smile, as if behind fans. “Aren’t you nice?” one says. “Oh, thank you,” says another, and bats her eyelashes. Lori says, “Give me a break,” and walks into the theater. I follow, and bump into our group’s shy, skinny engineer from Texas, from whom I have not heard a murmur so far, and who is now wobbling across the room in a white stretch velvet dress and a platinum Tina Turner shag.

Lori and I settle down in a booth; it’s clear to me that she would rather not sit with the rest of the group, which has settled in a large, dim cluster on the other side of the stage. We are joined by a tiny elderly couple from South Africa, on their twenty-fifth cruise. The Tina Turner engineer approaches with another crossdresser, whom I haven’t met, and then, at the last minute, sensing the utter lack of welcome, they pull back and join the larger group. I feel bad. Lori sighs. The elderly couple peer at the strange person in the tight white dress, and then at us, curiously. They are reassured, I think, although later I hear that Lori and Merrie have taken up with them and that they are as pleased to meet crossdressers as they have been to enjoy the chocolate buffet at midnight, to fox-trot in the Tahiti Lounge, and to visit the uninspiring port of Catalina. They seem incapable of having a bad time.

The engineer’s companion, in a tiny bright red dress with matching red satin pumps and black fishnet hose, comes back across the floor to us with a camera. He takes four or five photos of Lori and me and our little South African friends. As usual, we are supposed to be flattered: either Lori is so beautiful, or we make such a charming group, that a crossdresser we don’t know wishes to commemorate the occasion. Lori and I think that the photographer wants to show his friends at home how “real” both of us and therefore all of them look (and neither of us is flattered by that) or to suggest that the cruise has been an easy blending of the crossdressers and everyone else. Finally, smiling broadly, he leaves, with photos of us from every angle.

The emcee is English and unhappy. He mocks us all relentlessly and indiscriminately. He is as disgusted by the round-the-clock feeders as he is by the well-behaved reunion families and the blameless honeymoon couples; strolling on the deck and in the lounges, he assails us with cries of “You’re having such fun!” much as an unhappy lover might scream, “You’re ruining my life!”

The talent show opens with two couples from Japan demonstrating the rumba. The alpha couple, firmly occupying center stage, are in their late sixties and have been studying dance for about five years, or so I guess; it appears they speak no English, and the emcee gives only their names, with the same honeyed enthusiasm he reserves for the smallest children, the disabled, and the old. The beta couple are in their seventies and have been studying the rumba for about five minutes. They sway and snap their fingers ceremoniously and essay a few simple steps upstage while the other couple go from the basic box step into a hand-to-hand double break and twin turns, all slowly, elegantly, and with enormous intensity. The dancers are stately and exotic in black tie and rustling taffeta dresses, and even though their performance seems to take hours, they are applauded wildly.